Can Alberto Salazar straighten out American distance running?

If on Sunday, November 7th, you watch the New York City Marathon, chances are that one of the first things you’ll see is a pack of emaciated-looking men hurtling down the street at a little over twelve miles an hour, or about four minutes and fifty-five seconds a mile. To the onlooker, they will be an incomprehensible blur: a stampede of sharp-elbowed, highly focussed gazelles, so economical in their motion that they hardly seem to be touching the ground at all.

Somewhere in the middle of this pack will be a slight, pale runner from Michigan whose race bib reads “Ritz.” As the underdog, Ritz—whose full name is Dathan Ritzenhein—will attract less attention than the race favorites: Meb Keflezighi, who last year became the first American to win the race in a quarter century, and Haile Gebrselassie, an Ethiopian marathon legend and the world record holder in the event. This is fine with Ritzenhein, whose New York “début,” as marathoners say, came in 2006, when he was twenty-three years old and so hot a prospect that, according to Running Times, race organizers paid him about two hundred thousand dollars. (Ritzenhein’s agent disputes this figure.) A National Collegiate Champion in cross country, Ritzenhein arrived in New York amid predictions that he would be the next great American marathoner. For the first twenty miles, he seemed primed to fulfill that promise, staying on the heels of the leaders. But, as the race entered the Bronx, he started to lag. By the time the runners reached the homestretch, in Central Park, Ritzenhein was practically crawling. He finished eleventh.

Afterward, Ritzenhein blamed his inexperience for the disappointing performance. Over the next three years, however, little changed. In the 2008 Olympic marathon, Ritzenhein finished ninth, plagued by calf pains that forced him to stop mid-race to stretch. The following April, he finished in eleventh place in London, with a time, 2:10, that put him almost five minutes behind the winner. “London was really the last straw,” he said recently. “I thought, I’ve put so much into this. Do I really want to be just mediocre?”

Two months later, Ritzenhein left his coach of five years, Brad Hudson, to join a group of runners coached by Alberto Salazar, an enigmatic ex-racer regarded by many as the best American marathoner ever. For the past eight years, Salazar has been paid by Nike to lead a group of up to a dozen runners, who train together on the campus of the company, in Beaverton, Oregon—and who, Nike hopes, will win races wearing swoosh-adorned clothing. At first, Salazar had limited success. But in recent years he has acquired a certain mystique for his ability to cajole fragile runners into peak performance. Salazar has been widely credited with resuscitating the career of Alan Webb, a twenty-seven-year-old prodigy miler, and with guiding the ascent of two female American record holders, Kara Goucher and Amy Yoder Begley.

For Ritzenhein, initiation into Salazar’s group proceeded roughly. As a coach, Salazar had become obsessed with optimizing his runners’ form, and Ritzenhein did not escape that scrutiny. During the athletes’ regular track workouts, Salazar criticized both the cant of Ritzenhein’s pelvis and his nearly horizontal forearm carriage, which he argued was wasting energy. He also criticized him for his tendency to run with his thumbs pointing up, rather than curled over in a fist. (According to Salazar, this strained the forearm, and thus, through a long chain of physiological connections, the leg muscles.) Though the objections puzzled Ritzenhein, he didn’t question them. “Alberto told me, ‘It’s imperative that you believe completely in what we’re going to do,’ ” he recalled, “ ‘because it will be completely different from anything you’ve been taught.’ ”

Salazar’s tinkering was controversial. Among élite coaches and competitors, tampering with an athlete’s natural running style is recognized as a risky enterprise. Many top distance runners have idiosyncratic form, and adjusting even a minor detail of a racer’s alignment can trigger a cascade of changes: subtle shifts in knee or foot position that can make the runner vulnerable to injury. This was particularly true for Ritzenhein, who was prone to developing stress fractures in the metatarsal bones of his feet. “When you run a hundred miles a week, your body finds natural positions that work,” the élite Australian runner Craig Mottram points out. “It’s flirting with disaster to mess with that.”

After three months of training with Salazar, however, Ritzenhein went on a tear. At a five-thousand-metre race in Zurich that summer, he set a new American record. Six weeks later, he travelled to Birmingham, England, for the World Half-Marathon Championships, where he blew through the 13.1-mile course in sixty minutes, finishing in third place.

The performances spurred Salazar to attempt an even more radical overhaul of Ritzenhein’s stride the following fall. “I told Dathan, ‘To compete against the best, you’ve got to fix this,’ ” Salazar said in September. “ ‘But there’s a risk. We may injure you.’ Dathan said, ‘I’m willing to take that risk.’ And so we started changing his form.”

When Salazar began running competitively, in the late seventies, he was known as a “sitter”: he kept his hips so low that at times it looked as if he were straddling a desk chair. At six feet one, Salazar was also tall for a distance runner, with a gangly stride that initially led some competitors to discount him. Kirk Pfrangle, a racer with the Greater Boston Track Club, who first observed Salazar at a high-school track meet, recalls being baffled by his awkward mechanics. “It was like all the body parts were working in opposition to each other,” Pfrangle remembered. “And yet he was running incredibly fast.”

Pfrangle introduced himself after the meet, and invited Salazar to join the Track Club’s workouts. It was an unusual gesture. Salazar, who was born in Cuba and grew up in a suburb of Boston, was a promising teen-ager. But the Track Club was a bastion of élite runners, including the four-time Boston Marathon winner Bill Rodgers. Despite this, Salazar seemed unintimidated, often pushing himself painfully through the club’s workouts. “He was definitely Mr. Persistence,” Rodgers recalled.

After high school, Salazar enrolled at the University of Oregon and joined its cross-country and track teams, both of which were top-ranked. Salazar had always been competitive, and at Oregon he began exploring tools for enhancing performance, including an unwieldy scuba-type mouthpiece that used chemical crystals to absorb oxygen, supposedly mimicking the effects of training at altitude. To help his muscles recover from workouts, Salazar experimented with dimethyl sulfoxide, a lotion that horse trainers use to reduce inflammation in thoroughbred racehorses. A runner who knew Salazar at the time recalls that the lotion was absorbed quickly through the pores of the skin and then entered the bloodstream. “You’d rub it on, and then you’d get this real garlicky taste in your mouth,” he explained. “That’s how you knew it was working.” Eccentric as the technologies were, Salazar was meticulous in evaluating them: constantly monitoring the effect on his performance.

In college, Salazar did well but not spectacularly. In 1978, as a sophomore, he finished sixth in the ten-thousand-metre race at the N.C.A.A. Championships. Later that summer, Salazar, after struggling to keep pace with Rodgers, collapsed with heatstroke when he crossed the finish line at the Falmouth Road Race, in Cape Cod. He likely survived only because the race doctor had him lie in a plastic kiddie pool filled with ice water.

Though Salazar finished tenth, he nevertheless believed that he had passed a mental milestone. “After that race, I really felt, All right. I’m getting tough now,” he recalled. He intensified his training and, not long afterward, announced that he was going to prepare for the 1980 Olympics, in Moscow, by working out at altitude in Kenya’s Rift Valley.

Salazar got a room at a hunting lodge near Thomson’s Falls, not far from where an élite Kenyan team trained, but he spent much of his time running alone, pushing himself on remote, exhausting runs through the countryside. Rudy Chapa, who had been Salazar’s teammate at Oregon, remembers the trip as isolating. “He was living in this hotel by himself, with no one to talk to,” Chapa said. “He would just lie there and read the same newspaper article over and over again.” When the U.S. announced plans to boycott the Olympics, Salazar returned to the University of Oregon. Rather than slow down, though, he redoubled his training. During a layover at LaGuardia Airport, on the way home, he did an eleven-mile run around Queens. Examining his running logs for the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, he calculated that he took off an average of less than one day a year.

Salazar’s effort transformed him from a respectable collegiate racer into one of the best in the country. He won the first marathon he entered, in New York City in 1980. The next year, he won New York again, finishing in 2:08:13 and setting a new course record. The following spring, he outsprinted Dick Beardsley by two seconds in the Boston Marathon—a gruelling victory that came to be known as “the Duel in the Sun.” Racing Beardsley up Commonwealth Avenue in a fog of motorcycle exhaust, Salazar, toweringly rangy in red shorts and a white singlet, looked at once indomitable and haggard. For most of the race, he had drunk no water, worrying that the extra weight would slow him down, and his face was crusted with the white salt of crystallized sweat. After the finish line, he collapsed again, as he had at Falmouth. This time, his core temperature fell to eighty-eight degrees. To revive him, paramedics had to administer six quarts of intravenous saline.

Though Salazar went on to win the New York City Marathon a third time, in 1982, he soon began to struggle. He lost a marathon for the first time in the spring of 1983, in Rotterdam, after pulling a muscle in his groin. The following year, he developed patellar tendinitis in his knee and then a torn hamstring. From there, his performance plummeted. After qualifying for the 1984 Olympic marathon, in Los Angeles, Salazar spent weeks training in Houston, in an effort to mimic the heat of L.A., only to finish fifteenth. His Olympic teammate Pete Pfitzinger speculates that the training in Houston left Salazar exhausted. “If he’d been satisfied to be fifth in L.A., he could have trained moderately and gotten it,” Pfitzinger says. “But Alberto never wanted to be fifth in anything.”

At home in Eugene after the Olympics, Salazar began to feel increasingly sluggish. Fighting to restore his speed, he invested in a series of elaborate medical tools, including an ultrasound machine to ease his tendinitis and a coffinlike hyperbaric chamber that he believed would saturate his muscles with oxygen. He also relied on a Finnish masseur, who sometimes lived in an apartment above the garage. None of these strategies worked, and for the next decade Salazar all but abandoned running. He invested in and managed a restaurant in Eugene, then sold his share to take a job in the sports-marketing department at Nike, which had sponsored him during his racing days. Though marathoners often run fastest in their early thirties, Salazar’s collapse was early and abrupt. He had peaked at twenty-four and was finished at twenty-six.

Looking back, Salazar blames his form for his decline. “The way I ran, it wasn’t sustainable,” he said. “The attitude at the time was: if you were gifted with perfect form, great. If you weren’t, you were just kind of stuck.” While a runner with an awkward stride might win a few races, Salazar argues now, he’s ultimately doomed to break down: “The knee injury, the hamstring injury—in hindsight, these were the things that killed me.”

The Nike campus, situated ten miles outside Portland, has the leafy neatness of a modern Japanese garden. Pleasant stands of bamboo and birch flank an artificial lake, around which cluster large white buildings named after prominent Nike athletes (Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong, Alberto Salazar). The grounds feel both private and pristine. Even the forested two-mile running trail that encircles the property is elegant: impeccably overlaid with pale-gold wood chips, like a cross-country course staged by Pottery Barn.

Despite his injuries, Salazar still runs, and when we met one morning early this fall he arrived in a turquoise Livestrong T-shirt and old gray shorts. With his long legs and short hair, he retains an intimidating lankiness, though he moves stiffly, with a lock-jointed gait like the canter of an elderly racehorse.

After jogging around a field five or six times, he stretched briefly on the grass, then launched into an aggressive round of sit-ups and push-ups. “I’m sorry, but I have to get this done,” he said apologetically during a particularly energetic set of crunches. In person, Salazar is unexpectedly warm, with a face that is both rounder and more kindly than photographs of him suggest. When I told him after the run that his form looked good, he flushed with pleasure.

Now fifty-two, Salazar has been married for almost thirty years, and has three grown children, Tony, Alex, and Maria, all of whom have had successful collegiate sports careers. Even before Tony, the eldest, reached junior high, Salazar hired a personal trainer to accompany the family on vacations, and he paid the same attention to their training as he had once paid to his own. Tony, a former University of Oregon wide receiver, who now works as a weight-room coach at Nike, recalls, “He used to wake me up at three in the morning with a protein shake. Back then, I was trying to gain weight for football, and sleep was the longest period that I’d go without eating. He’d go downstairs, turn on the blender, and then bring the drink to me in bed.”

Though Salazar mentored a handful of athletes in the mid-nineties, he didn’t begin coaching formally until 2001. That April, Salazar and Tom Clarke, a former competitive racer who was then the president of Nike, met to watch the Boston Marathon on TV in the company’s cafeteria. As the top American crossed the finish line in sixth place, the men exchanged a baleful glance. “All the television announcers started gushing over how great that was,” Salazar recalled, “and Tom and I just looked at each other. It was, like, Wow. We’ve sunk so low that sixth place is considered an accomplishment.”

In Salazar’s view, American athletes were failing because they couldn’t match the training of the East African runners, who had dominated the marathon since his own retirement. From 1984 until Keflezighi’s victory last year, no American man had won in either Boston or New York, and in many of those years no American had finished in the top ten. And it wasn’t just that the Africans were faster: American runners were getting slower. In the twenty years since the Duel in the Sun, only one American had managed to run in any marathon as fast as Beardsley and Salazar had that day in Boston. Today, thirteen of the twenty-five fastest marathon times on record are held by Kenyans, and nine by Ethiopians—including the current world record, of 2:03:59, set by Gebrselassie in 2008.

Salazar believed that to offset the advantages held by the East African runners, many of whom grew up in high-altitude areas like the Rift Valley and began running long distances in childhood, American runners needed to harness the advantages provided by money and technology—both of which Clarke could provide. That fall, Salazar and Clarke launched a training program dubbed the Oregon Project.

At first, Salazar’s scheme was bizarrely complex. Among other things, he arranged for the design of a sealed house near the Nike campus in which athletes would sleep in rooms with varied amounts of oxygen. He also used an obscure computer program from Russia that claimed to measure an athlete’s fatigue level using electrodes that tracked variations in heart rate and in a runner’s “omega brain waves.” The venture proved to be, at best, a modest success. The runners Salazar managed to recruit for his experimental project were, by his own estimate, “B-plus” competitors, and the OmegaWave system was unpopular with many of the athletes, who didn’t fully take to the thin air and close quarters of the altitude house, either.

In late 2005, Salazar began overhauling the Oregon Project. He recruited A-list racers, including Kara Goucher, while the members of the original team gradually left. He also abandoned the OmegaWave system and began to shift his emphasis from technology to form. The transformation was startling. Within a short time, the Oregon Project runners began producing standout performances, including a third-place finish by Goucher in the 2009 Boston Marathon. That fall, the U.S.A. Track and Field Association named Salazar Coach of the Year. Josh Rohatinsky, who trained with Salazar from 2007 to 2009, notes that “any new concept that attracts Alberto, he goes at it one million per cent. That’s what makes him good, but it can also be his downfall.”

Salazar’s interest in form began in 2006. Watching a race on TV, he was struck by something distinctive in the stride of an Ethiopian racer named Kenenisa Bekele, the world record holder in both the five thousand metres and the ten thousand metres. Scrutinizing Bekele’s body on the screen, Salazar noticed that he didn’t arc his back leg up slowly between strides but instead retracted it sharply, like a piston. “While all these other runners had long, trailing legs, his foot was coming right up to his butt,” Salazar recalled. “I thought, Is that just coincidence? Or could that perhaps be part of why he’s so good?”

Salazar called the retired sprinter Michael Johnson, a four-time Olympic gold medalist who now heads the Michael Johnson Performance Center, in Dallas. “I told him, ‘Hey, Michael, I’m watching this race . . . ’ And when he heard what I was saying he laughed. He said, ‘Alberto, that’s Sprint 101 biomechanics!’ ”

According to Johnson, sprinters retract their trailing leg quickly for two reasons: it generates power, and it means that the foot has a shorter distance to travel before it arrives back in position for another stride. Salazar said, “One thing sprinters say is: Go to the ground. Don’t wait for the ground to come to you.” By “going to the butt,” he believes, Bekele can take more strides per minute—which gives him greater speed.

To capture this advantage, Salazar commissioned Lance Walker, the Michael Johnson Center’s director of performance, to measure the exact angles of Bekele’s arms and legs at different points in his stride, using videos of races that he found online. Initially, Walker was reluctant. An expert in sprint mechanics, he knew nothing about long-distance form, and sprinters and distance runners had been thought to have little in common. While sprinters needed mammoth muscles and explosive power, marathoners needed efficiency and endurance. Watching the videos, however, he discovered that Bekele’s form closely resembled that of a top sprinter. “The more tape we broke down,” he recalled, “the more it became clear: he was harnessing the same advantages as a sprinter.”

Walker also began to notice some uncanny similarities among the very best runners. The fastest finishers had a higher thigh drive, for one thing; at its apex, their femur bone was almost parallel to the ground, like the front legs of a bounding deer. They also slapped the ground so quickly with their forefoot that the contact seemed almost incidental. According to Walker, the short slap transfers force more efficiently, shooting it from the ground forward into the pelvis, rather than allowing it to dissipate in the flex of the foot. The effect, Walker says, is like “a pogo stick with a stiff spring.” He explained, “You want the chain of force to travel from the ground through the body with minimal energy loss. That’s what it means to run efficiently.”

Because an efficient runner requires less muscle to propel himself, he can also be lighter—an advantage, since carrying extra weight takes energy. “If you look at the best guys, they’re just bone and tendon and skin,” Walker said. “When you’re that efficient, you don’t need so much to power you.”

Not long after Ritzenhein’s breakout season, in 2009, Salazar asked Walker to compare footage of Ritzenhein with footage of Bekele. Since high school, Ritzenhein had been a heel striker; even when he was running at speed, his heel struck the ground before the ball of his foot did. Salazar wanted him to run more on his forefoot and also to strike the pavement more sharply—“like you’re clawing at the ground,” Ritzenhein described it—to maximize the energy pushing him forward. “Dathan can’t be a heel striker and expect to run as fast as the best forefoot runners,” Salazar said. “I told him, ‘Realistically, if we don’t change your biomechanics, I don’t think I can get you there.’ ”

Seated in a cluttered conference room at Nike one day this summer, Salazar opened his laptop and pulled up a video of Ritzenhein running circuits around a track, and put it in slow motion. Comparing the video to one of Bekele, Salazar explained, had revealed several flaws in Ritzenhein’s form, including a problem with his elbow drive: the amount of thrust produced by the rearward pump of his upper arms. While Ritzenhein typically throws his elbows back at around a sixty-degree angle when he’s running hard, Bekele throws his back at almost seventy degrees—generating a correspondingly more powerful push. The comparison also identified a problematic gap between Ritzenhein’s knees at the moment when his front foot struck the ground. Freezing the frame, Salazar targeted a wedge-shaped space between Ritzenhein’s thighs. That gap reflected both Ritzenhein’s tendency to heel-strike and the sluggish recovery of his trailing leg. “It’s only in slow motion that you can see it, but that’s braking him,” Salazar said, leaning in to peer intently at Ritzenhein’s shorts. “There’s a little hiccup. He’s reaching too far forward with that heel.”

Salazar believes that a runner striking even slightly in front of his body will experience a momentary hesitation while the hamstring labors to pull his torso forward over the grounded foot. “It’s like having a square wheel on your car,” Salazar said. “Each time it comes around, there’s a moment where the car will lurch.”

Switching to a video of Bekele, Salazar grew animated. “If you look at Bekele and you look at Gebrselassie—and Gebrselassie is the first one we saw this with—he’s not sitting,” he said, stabbing a finger at the runner’s pelvis. “His hips are directly under his body, which is directly above his foot. So all that force is going up through his legs and hips into his upper body, to propel him forward. There’s nothing being lost there.”

video: Jennifer Kahn analyzes the form of the marathon runner Dathan Ritzenhein.

Ritzenhein began his transformation last fall, but the switch proved calamitous. Already prone to injury, he developed sesamoiditis in his left foot, a painful inflammation in two small bones near the big toe. To relieve the pressure, Salazar dug a hole in the insole of Ritzenhein’s shoe, which he buttressed with duct tape. The modification relieved the sesamoiditis, but it also caused a stress fracture by transferring more strain onto the third metatarsal.

Though Ritzenhein’s foot healed, the damage thwarted his training, forcing him to pull out of the World Cross Country Championships in March, 2010. A few months afterward, the record he set in Zurich was broken by Bernard Lagat—at a race in Oslo that Ritzenhein missed because of injury.

“It just kind of kept going,” Ritzenhein said grimly when we spoke last summer. “Alberto said, ‘I’m sorry. We blew it.’ Frankly, it was a bit of a disaster.”

Ritzenhein, who is now twenty-seven, has close-cropped light-brown hair and a narrow face. At five feet eight and a hundred and twenty pounds, his body doesn’t appear gaunt so much as taut, with legs that resemble those of a twelve-year-old girl: hairless, concave, knob-kneed, and so smoothly tan that they appear to be molded out of a soft, flesh-colored plastic. A small, multicolored tattoo of the Olympic rings decorates one calf.

Following the stress fracture last fall, Salazar took Ritzenhein to see Gordon Valiant, Nike’s house expert in biomechanics. Valiant put him on a sixty-metre test track outfitted with a force plate and had him run barefoot. Sensors in the force plate recorded the amount of force exerted on each part of the foot during impact: his so-called “loading pattern.” That pattern revealed a spike under Ritzenhein’s third metatarsal. To compensate for that, Valiant engineered a thin orthotic embedded with a small oval of ultra-soft foam to support the injured bone, which Ritzenhein has been using since mid-July, when he returned to high-mileage training. Salazar also instructed Ritzenhein to replace his sharp forefoot strike with a less aggressive landing on the midfoot, and he reduced the number of miles that Ritzenhein ran, compensating for the lost distance with long sessions of aqua jogging, plus workouts on Nike’s altered-gravity treadmill, a pressurized pod that allows athletes to run with artificially lowered body weight.

So far, the modifications seem to be working. Ritzenhein typically works out twice a day, and one hot, muggy morning in late August his schedule began with a ten-mile run on grass at an easy pace of six minutes a mile, followed by a set of customized plyometrics, twenty minutes of aqua jogging, and an hour of weights. “From the start, Alberto told me that he’s going to screw up sometimes,” Ritzenhein said as he stood on the sidelines of a fastidiously trimmed field. “But he also said that he’s going to know he screwed up, and fix it. Having faith that he knows what he’s doing—that’s the most important thing.”

From the sidelines, at least, the recovery appeared complete. Taking laps around the grassy field, Ritzenhein looked less like a preteen girl than like a creature that would be at home on the veldt: a sleek human oryx. His quads are rock-hard but very small, and his shoulders and torso appear to be made out of hammered white leather. His expression, insofar as he had one, reflected concentration. The only exception came when Ritzenhein’s wife, Kalin, arrived with their newborn son, Jude, and three-year-old daughter, Addison, who staggered onto the field. Ritzenhein beamed. “Hi, Addy!” he called, then ran past her. Beyond that, Ritzenhein scarcely seemed to change position over each circuit. Occasionally, he scratched his thigh. Once, he wiped sweat from his brow. The run appeared eerily smooth: a model of prey-animal efficiency.

Maintaining this new form has been a challenge. “I have to think about it all the time now,” Ritzenhein said. “My upper body especially. I’ll be running around the field and Alberto will say, ‘Get your thumbs down! You have your thumbs up!’ ”

After running, Ritzenhein stretched briefly on the sidelines, then began a complex series of exercises designed by Lance Walker. In order for a runner’s elbow thrust to work, Ritzenhein explained, his core has to be strong enough for the momentum to be transferred through the oblique muscles of the abdomen into the pelvis. This day, he began by hopping forward, kicking one leg out, then bowing gracefully to tap the toe of his shoe. He followed that with a more military maneuver, scuffing rapidly across the grass, then abruptly stopping and jackknifing one leg at the knee, pulling the heel sharply toward his buttock.

Ritzenhein later admitted that one of the most crushing aspects of his injury last fall was that it had happened under Salazar’s tutelage. “When I came to Alberto, I thought I was done being hurt,” Ritzenhein said. “But this is the longest cycle of injuries that I’ve ever had: probably by double, or even triple.”

Ritzenhein has been unable to practice his race tactics for more than a year—a disadvantage that became evident during a half marathon in England in mid-September. Salazar had estimated his ideal finish at sixty-one minutes, but the lead group went out faster than that pace. Ritzenhein tried to hold on, only to fade at Mile 8, nearly crippled by shooting pains in his calves. He finished in 62:35, substantially slower than Salazar’s estimate. Talking to reporters afterward, he conceded, “I guess I’m not as fit as I thought I was.”

Since then, Ritzenhein has been training hard. He spent two weeks running at altitude in New Mexico, often covering between eighteen and twenty-six miles a day. He has also continued to monitor small details of his form, particularly his upper body. Victory in New York is a realistic goal, he believes. “I think I’m fit enough that I could win.” Even so, he acknowledges, the process is a gamble. “It’s a hard thing changing something when you don’t know what the outcome is going to be,” he said. “It’s uncharted territory for me now.”

Not everyone is so optimistic. Gabe Jennings, who competed in the fifteen-hundred-metre race at the 2000 Olympics, thinks that Ritzenhein may be too old to adopt a new running style. Jennings, who was himself disabled by an Achilles-tendon injury at the age of twenty-eight, after a coach attempted to modify his natural stride, said, “It’s very rare to switch approaches at this age and have it be successful,” adding, “If Alberto pulls this off with Dathan, it’ll be very impressive.”

As Salazar sees it, though, Ritzenhein needs to have perfect biomechanics if he is to have a chance at finishing ahead of Gebrselassie and Keflezighi, both of whom train relentlessly and seem to run effortlessly. That fact, he says, is one that Ritzenhein accepts. “When you start changing an athlete’s form, there’s always a risk,” Salazar said, with a shrug. “Dathan knows that. And he’s willing to take that risk, because he doesn’t want to be the guy that’s just trying to get a bronze medal. Not this time. This time, he wants to be the winner.” ♦

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